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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the World Series didn't occur during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off one death-defying escape act after another before prevailing in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged many negative stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It is so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were sent into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams quickly released messages of support with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of current political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently committed $1m in support for families personally affected by the raids but made no official criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their 2024 World Series win at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and present and past athletes. Several players such as the coach had voiced reluctance to go to the White House during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Control and Supporter Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a detention corporation that runs enforcement centers. The group's leadership has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors contribute to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man protest must have given the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who have similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in suits don't get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area above downtown and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the home he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {